We’re on our third day out and things are looking brighter. More (and more) servers are up, problems were solved and we get lots of great feedbacks. Users who experienced disconnections or had problems opening files – give us another shot now. We are very excited to hear about users who are already using WS in the field and opening drawing on their iPad in meetings. There are also many users who wrote to us that they bought iPad just to use WS. If you don’t have an iPad that’s the right time to ask one from your boss – it’s trendy

Another satisfied user is Mr Amar Hanspal, Senior Vice President, PSEB-Platform Group, Autodesk, Inc. PSEB Platfrom group, in charge of among other things products such as AutoCAD and Autodesk Labs. Here’s a message from Amar about AutoCAD WS first few days :

“Yesterday Autodesk announced the availability of AutoCAD WS, an innovative new product that extends AutoCAD through the cloud to web and mobile devices including iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.  We have been amazed and overwhelmed by the response to this launch.

Within the first 24 hours of availability of the AutoCAD WS mobile application on the iTunes App Store, it was been downloaded over 125,000 time. Over 80,000 new user accounts were created and more than 35,000 drawings have been uploaded.  This has vastly exceeded our expectations and our servers have struggled to keep up with the demand.  We know this has resulted in a less than perfect user experience and in some cases a complete inability to even view the sample drawings contained in the mobile application.  We have worked through the night in Israel where the AutoCAD WS team is based to scale the service so we can better meet this unprecedented demand AutoCAD WS represents a significant advance for design, moving it beyond the desktop to the field, and accelerating better design.

During The technology preview phase of AutoCAD WS(Project Butterfly), Autodesk was thrilled to have the active participation of over 75,000 users within 20,000 accounts. These users made it clear to us that AutoCAD WS would be readily adopted and would quickly cement itself into the workflow of the world’s architects, designers and engineers, but we never expected the type of response we’ve seen in the past two days.  We thank everybody who has attempted to use AutoCAD WS for their interest and patience and hope that you will try AutoCAD WS again as we bring more capacity online.”

Amar

We've just wanted to thank all Butterfly users and our 150,000 new users for your patience.  We are overwhelmed with the amount of drawings which were uploaded to the web and to mobile devices and the amount of reviews that we receive. 

Here is a short summary of the first AutoCAD WS 48 hours:

Technical issues – our developer team is working around the clock to upload more servers and to support more users. We've tripled the number of WS servers  since yesterday. We are still working on improving the performances and to upload more servers. In case you are experiencing disconnections or slow performance please wait a while and try it again a bit later. We had some problems supporting files uploads, this problem is solved now, you can upload drawings and view them on your mobile device.

Offline support and opening e-mail attachments – These are by far the most requested features. We are fully aware to the importance of viewing and editing drawings when working on the site with no Wifi. We are working on these features and hope to release them as soon as possible. We are also looking into using iTunes to copy drawings to the mobile app. We are only at a first version, so there is much more to come.

We've received over 1000 feedback from you guys. Thanks for all the compliments. Other features that our users would like to see are copy tool, layers control, DWF support, integration with DropBox and off course, an Android app. When we've first launched Butterfly (which is the web interface of AutoCAD WS now), the most popular request was adding a command line. I have to admit that I couldn't believe it but we've received some feedback of users who would like to have a command line on their iPhone. I don't think that we'll add a command line there but we're exploring more ways to use touch gestures to make drawing and editing more accurate and friendly.  Keep sending us feedback, we are reading every single one of them. 

Don't give up, we are adding more servers and solving more scaling problems daily. 

Update - we've removed drawing thumbnails temporarily in order to optimize site performance. All thumbnails will be back right after the weekend

Hi, we wanted to let you know that our first day launch has been a great success so far with tens of thousands of users trying out AutoCAD WS web and mobile and uploading tens of thousands of drawings. This has also been causing a lot of scaling issues which may be affecting the app’s speed and connectivity for some of you. These include disconnects or problems uploading drawings. We’re working on fixing those and adding servers as quickly as we can, so bear with us. All these issues should be fixed very soon, giving you a great experience for uploading and editing as many drawings as you’d like on your browser, phone and tablet.

Update – more servers are up. Things are working better and users are experiencing less disconnections. We’re still working on improving performance.